


Fall on a rock and crack your head

by BlockSwingPerry



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Gen, Oneshot, not edited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:15:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22296919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlockSwingPerry/pseuds/BlockSwingPerry
Summary: You should have looked where you were going. Maybe you'd still be alive.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14





	Fall on a rock and crack your head

“There has to be at least one person in this town with a phone,” muttered Wirt. He was tired, and he wanted to go home. He walked up to one of the doors and knocked. Nobody answered. He tried the door, and found it unlocked. Which wasn’t that weird the more Wirt thought about it. Nothing much to steal from farmfolk.

“Hello? Anybody in here? I just need to borrow a pho-” Wirt stopped dead in his tracks. A turkey (dead maybe?) laid across the table and really caught him off guard. “Um, I was just wondering if you had a phone I could borrow?” The turkey raised his head. They looked at each other in silence for a moment before Wirt felt awkward. “I’ll just go,” he said and closed the door. The turkey laid it’s head back down.

Okay, so he wasn’t expecting a turkey citizen. Did all the houses contain turkeys? Surely turkeys had no use for the pumpkin fields that were littered around the town. As he was thinking over the complications of turkeys and pumpkins, he did not notice a rock in the middle of the road. He tripped on his shoe lace and smacked his head hard on the rock. And that was how the townsfolk found him. Lying on the ground and his head all bloody. 

“Tell Enoch we got another one. He might be ready next month. A little late for the party, but the more the merrier.” A person, all dressed in pumpkins and corn husk, almost like the cornhusk doll Wirt himself made when he was little and living in the country, remarked. 

The pumpkin’s companion agreed and went to alert Enoch of their soon to be newest citizen. Wirt was buried in the middle of one of the empty fields. The townsfolk worked quick to cover him with dirt.  
____________________________________________________________________________

Greg could not find his brother. He had wandered off to go find someone with a phone, but when checking a few houses he gave up.   
“Hey, Beatrice have you seen my brother?” Greg asked turning to the little bluebird. “Could you send a magic tiger to go find my brother? I haven’t used my wish yet.”

“For the last tim-” Beatrice was about to really scold the kid, but then thought better of it. “Hey, look kid! There’s a bunch of people going into that building! Let’s go check it out!” She sighed in relief when Greg agreed to go. 

As they entered the barn the duet noticed a couple things. One, the people were wearing pumpkins and dried cornhusks. Two, there seemed to be a festival going on. Three, no sign of Wirt. Greg went up to one and started asking questions. And that was how their night went. Stopping to dance or join in the festivities. Eventually the head of the town realized they had crashed their party and accidentally smashed a few pumpkins. 

The punishment for their wrongdoings was to finish shucking corn and cleaning up after the festivities in the barn. They did their work as all the pumpkin wearing citizens marched out to complete whatever last hurrah that would complete the festival. 

“What do you think they’re doing out there? Do you think Wirt will hear the pumpkin people and come and find us? Wirt is a very good finder. He found our frog!” Greg rambled as he worked to Beatrice, who wasn’t doing much work at all. (In her defense shucking corn and picking up large objects with her little bird feet is a hard task.) 

“I don’t know. Maybe. Your brother couldn’t have possibly wandered far, considering that he knows we’re here. Maybe,” Beatrice paused for a moment thinking of the horrible beast, her curse, and her own numerous siblings, “he’s looking for food? No not food, uh, I think he told me he heard a magic tiger around here.” Greg’s distrust of this answer was clear on his face, but he didn’t press on.  
____________________________________________________________________________

They stayed in the town, on Beatrice's request, with one of the pumpkin people. The couple they stayed with was Marget and James. They were lovely folk, but their slightly strange behaviour combined with Wirt’s disappearance, they were more than weary. What if...Wirt was still with them? Just not on the plane of the living. This thought borrowed into their heads. 

Now that they thought about it, when they first got here didn’t the ground look disturbed? Just large enough a patch that it could possibly hold...a body. They both looked at each other with horror. They made plans to check the dirt out in the middle of the night, so as not to wake what could be pumpkin murders.  
____________________________________________________________________________

It was dark out. Greg and Beatrice slowly creeped out into the night, heads sharply turning at each sound. They made their way into the empty field, where the dirt layed disturbed, possibly because of the load it may now carry. Greg had grabbed a shovel earlier, and now used it to take in shovel-fuls of dirt and throwing it to the side. Beatrice kept watch ready to take Greg and leave this place forever. 

After some time, Greg’s shovel hit something. He hurriedly started to dig out the outline of the object. Slowly, the truth was revealed. Wirt’s body laid snuggly in his grave, surprisingly not as decomposed as it should be. His body was mostly whole, besides a huge patch of flesh that was missing from his left half of his face. His skeleton was visible just a few inches from the jaw, and surrounded his eye. It almost looked intentional, like an obviously fake halloween costume with gore, except his skin was a terrible white color, with his lips tinged with blue.

They screeched, and they could hear the citizens of the town waking up and heading their way, but at the moment they were a bit occupied. Their screech of fear was involuntary, and had awoken Wirt. Wirt’s body struggled, not completely dug up.  
“Wha-, WHAT THE ACTUAL FU-” Wirt’s body was cut off when the head of the town yelled in a bellowing voice, “WHO DISTURBS THE RESTING?” The three scrambled a bit, blurting out unintelligible answers and jumping and avoiding each other when Wirt tried to get out of the hole he was in and Greg and Beatrice dancing around his arms. 

“I’ve seen you woken up our newest citizen, that wa-” Enoch was cut off by Greg’s high pitched, “OH GOSH YOU KILLED WIRT!” 

“What? Oh you mean the young lad? He fell and hit his head and died. We were merely doing a kind act when we got there and it was too late. A tad strange you were able to wake him up earlier than the ground would allow. Unless. Hmmm. Perhaps we were a little bit too hasty to let him join us.”

Enoch had bent his streamer-like arms in thought, the villagers muttering that it was strange Wirt was able to move around in his current state, and they didn’t check if he had stopped breathing had they? 

There was a brief moment of silence when, in a tiny voice, Wirt asked, “ ᵂʰᵃᵗ ʰᵃᵖᵖᵉⁿᵉᵈ ᵗᵒ ᵐʸ ᶠᵃᶜᵉˀ” He had finally gotten out of the hole, looking a little worse for wear. His clothes were of course dirty, and his skin still that awful white and blue. The only difference was his confused expression. 

“Er, it appears you were...too early.” Enoch, who usually held such authoritative command in his voice, sounds deeply ashamed. “It’s how things are run here. The dead are brought here to us, we bury them, and the dirt gives them a new life. But since you weren’t entirely dead when you were placed, I’m not exactly sure what you are. Undead perhaps?”  
___________________________________________________________________________  
Wirt, Greg, and Beatrice had a whole lot of questions, but as soon as Enoch said Undead both Greg and Wirt whispered Zombies and promptly forgot their questions. 

As they soon found out, Wirt was not unlike a zombie. The soil he was buried in had special properties. It decomposes and in return, a new life as a byproduct occurs. The pumpkins and other crops grown in the soil were special too, as they sustained the now living skeletons with more of the strange energy found in the soil and the evolved plant life. 

Since Wirt wasn’t completely dead when he was placed, he died in the soil which screwed up the dirt’s properties. So instead of using his dead flesh as a means to rejuvenate him, it was stuck in a loop trying to eat away at his head wound and repatching it. It also reached into his still beating heart, effectively chaining his life to the soil. Encoh had a remedy for this. As the trio started back up on their journey home, he gave Wirt (who had already taken up wearing a pumpkin head) a small sack of pumpkin seeds, so he could grow his own.


End file.
